"Donald Trump is often portrayed as an unpredictable recluse prone to say or do anything, but he carried out a relatively consistent Middle East policy during his first term," Dale Sprusansky writes. "There’s good reason to believe he will not stray far from this previously established template."

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"While some Turks were highly disturbed by Donald Trump’s November U.S. presidential election victory, others have seen it as heralding a positive turn in Turkish-U.S. relations," Jonathan Gorvett notes. In particular, Ankara views Trump as more likely to drop U.S. support for Kurdish groups Türkiye views as terrorists.

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Speaking in Washington, DC in November, Prince Turki Al Faisal Al-Saud said the U.S. stance on Gaza has been a “total disappointment....If this type of conduct continues with the new administration, the mistrust of American policies would hamper any future initiatives by the United States. Continued failure of addressing the issue of Palestine, the mother of all conflicts in the region, has been and will continue to be the bone of contention between the Arab world and American administrations.” 

Al-Saud also reiterated Riyadh’s position that “there will be no normalization with Israel without a Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem.”

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"Mayors in the Middle offers a remarkable investigation of Israeli control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)-administered West Bank vis-à-vis municipal politics and governance. The book’s most significant contribution is its ingenious theorizing of 'indirect rule,' which is carried out in part through collaboration with intermediaries from the ‘native,’ indigenous, or preexisting population.

As author Diana B. Greenwald outlines, indirect rule requires a class of indigenous intermediaries to administer the everyday lives of their populations, including through repression. These regimes, tasked with crucial responsibilities in the colonial apparatus, are typically intrinsically unpopular with the indigenous population. The PA, which not only manages some fiscal and administrative responsibilities but also coordinates its security forces with the Israeli military, is an exemplar of such an intermediary." 

Read Matthew Vickers' Full Review

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